Has To Do With Life
by PallaPlease
Summary: [Tudgeman/Miranda of a sort.]  High school: a time of pining, angst, and walking into street lights.  Tudgeman has an unrequited crush - or at least he thinks it isn't returned.


Notes: Not much to say, actually - your standard high school fic, as well as Tudgeman-riffic. One-shot that might lead into a multi-parter story.  
  
Dedicated: To Beckna-chan, who might have not forgiven me for converting her from Miranda/Gordo to the glories of L/G, but has decided we're even by making me a MS/LT fan.   
  
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Has To Do With Life  
  
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He nearly dropped his lunch tray - laden with an unidentifiable spaghetti sauce and the various bits of inedible fruit the workers insisted on providing - on his foot, his only saving grace being his fingers tightening convulsively around the plastic tray when she smiled at him. A muscle in his slender throat bobbed, shifting with his surprised, heavy swallow with a mouth that was suddenly dry, feeling as though the top of his jaw had been scraped roughly with a ball of cotton. It was a fleeting hope, one of those stupid deluding emotions that sprang up whenever she or one of her friends dared look at him, and he felt any of the suave confidence he tried to hold disappear into blithe self-consciousness; she was *looking* at him.  
  
And when he remembered that, yes, God had thought to grant him feet and therefore he was capable of walking, he took one step forward only to be elbowed accidentally - but most likely on purpose, knowing the ruthlessness of several girls first-hand - by a thin girl. "Watch it, Tudgeman," she ordered by law of nature, glossy red hair shining unpleasantly under the lights, and then with a shrill sound of greeting, "Miranda!" He moved to the side, because, after all, she had not smiled at him, but at the cruel girl with the high voice jostling past him.  
  
Not that he was truly surprised, Larry reminded himself, adopting a bland expression and, gangly elbows pulled tight to his green polo, hurrying to the corner of the cafeteria he was welcomed in. Table gleaming plainly in the fluorescent lighting, the peering faces of the few people who deemed him worthy to be friend, and the same unappealing mess of food that came with each school meal: this was what he should expect. She had been kind to him - in her off-hand, acerbic way - in the past, occasionally finding reason to treat him humanely in various projects in high school when she thought it suitable, but though she was no longer purposefully mean to him she was not a friend.  
  
Lowly Tudgeman was never good enough for the likes of Miranda Sanchez, not romantically, and as he stabbed his fork into the spaghetti, smiling at one of the girls' comments on food poisoning, he felt an internal embarrassment for even thinking such a thing. It was not that he liked her or even felt anything resembling a crush on her for the longest time, not since the ninth grade at least, and he was simply clinging to an old hope; nothing was to come from wondering irrationally if she remembered who he was and in the long run it could only damage his self-worth.  
  
All in all, it was a typical lunch day for him.  
  
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He had pushed biology off for the first three years of high school, more interested in mathematics and passing English than taking a course he was more intrigued with; thank God, he thought, that he finally managed to sign up for it. Never mind the fact that seniors were not allowed to graduate without at least two years of foreign language plus biology to graduate, he was merely fascinated with the science of it all. Inner workings of the mind and body had struck him as immensely riveting for years of filching bits of knowledge from his cousin's college textbooks with a dictionary at his side, and in the first two weeks of the new school year, he focused his attentions entirely on the teacher's lectures and the narrative of his book.  
  
Almost entirely, amended Larry mentally as he turned the page of his book and read a scraggly note in the margin made with a dying ballpoint pen, granting a patronizing shake of his head to it. Were he to judge by the frustrated confusion evident in the many notes penned into the book by its owner in the previous year, it would seem the lady Sanchez had barely passed the course at all. He assumed it was fate, or God, that had delivered him to the text she had used the year before, and was frequently amused by her exasperated demands and expressive punctuation - she had poked a hole through one of the pages dotting a particularly thick exclamation point.  
  
The teacher made a general comment on which pages were to be read and notated for studying this eve, in preparation of a faux-quiz the next day, and he hurried to jot down the numbers in his tidy notebook, slanting handwriting easily added on to. His chore was done, the lecture finished, and he relaxed slightly on the harsh metal stool, flipping to the next page and scanning for any more Miranda notes.   
  
God I hate this class to infinity! - she wrote in dark blue ink, stabbing her pen viciously where dots were needed. Deep dents were etched in where the pen had very nearly broken the glossy paper, and he winced marginally in reflex, the book-lover in him mourning the shallow mistreatment of the paper. The Miranda-lover in him murmured something, sang it quietly in his heart where he was thankful he could not hear, not comfortable with the traitorous beating therein.  
  
She continued in such a vein for the next few pages, occasionally underlining a brief passage and making frantic question marks near the conclusion: What does any of this mean?! Who reads this, she added and he imagined her tone as ridiculing, and why are they still allowed on the streets?   
  
Even Gordo doesn't understand this (I asked Liz), Miranda pointed out beside a lengthy exultation on the virtues of polygamous reproduction and why humanity should adopt said procedures; he understood the viewpoint himself, but Larry personally thought it a load of crock - but then again, he'd always been something of a sucker for tales of True Love and the mundane fairy tales of monogamous marital life.  
  
But he paused, reading at the bottom where she had jotted in a calmer, neater handwriting - he could envision her seated in one of the beanbag chairs at the mall, in the study group she was with that frequented the coffee shop, a pen flicking bored words over the pages - and he blinked his eyes, hard, trying to recognize the words for what they were:  
  
Will ask Lizzie to ask Tudgeman if he'd be OK to help me. Hasn't taken blgy - a curt shorthand for the class - yet, but knowing Tudge he'll whiz thru it right away.  
  
She knows I exist! - he thought with a burst of excitement fluttering in his thin fingers and through his tall, inordinately slender frame; he frowned at himself, flat dark hair shifting in the painfully brisk air conditioning of the biology room, and squashed the sudden buzz of pleasure at being acknowledged, even a year past. Obviously, though, she had not considered him worth even trying to contact, as he had no memory of Lizzie contacting him at all in junior year.  
  
Idly thumbing his book, Larry reflected on all the yes-no-yes-no idiosyncrasies of Miranda and wondered what clicked her into being and movement.  
  
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"Oh, hey, Tudgeman," she said precisely three days later as Friday morning began. He glanced up from his Star Trek book and tried to connect those words with his reality as it was; God bless Picard, he thought absently as he walked into a light pole outside the high school and promptly rebounded to the sidewalk, staggering backwards and sagging against the brick wall rimming the school grounds.  
  
"¡Dios santo!" she swore, and though his handle on Spanish was not overwhelmingly good, he gathered it was a religious oath of some sort. By the time his vision had cleared, he was seated on the ground, Star Trek book still loosely clasped in his palm, one long leg bent up, and his eyes blinking blearily up at a roundly pretty face that was at turns exasperated and concerned.   
  
"You walked right into that thing, didn't you," she said wryly, reaching a slender pale brown hand down and giving him a sarcastic look. "If I knew you'd be so jumpy if I just tried to be friendly, I wouldn't have even opened my mouth." Her mouth quirked up in a lopsided, twitching smile, and Miranda looked as though her exasperation had given way to amusement.  
  
Regardless of any pointless feelings he had, he still had his pride, and Larry stood stiffly, brushing his hands down today's polo and adopted a look of affronted superiority. "Nothing to worry yourself about, Miss Sanchez," he said breezily, clapping a hand protectively over his Star Trek book. "I'm, uh, perfectly fine and there's nothing to be concerned about. Just," wait, he thought sardonically, here we go with this morning's crappy excuse, "a guy thing. As I'm sure you know."  
  
She raised a slender black eyebrow, the beauty mark by her mouth lifting as she grinned at him, obviously not willing to rise to the absurd remark. "You can be such a stupid boy," she replied in a teasing tone, the mild wind flapping the ruffled collar of her dipping red shirt, "as I'm sure you know." With that done, she granted him one last grin hovering on a smirk, and arms swinging daintily in time with her stride, she left, but not before giving him one last: "I say this with a great amount of respect, Tudge - but you're really a freak. Get the clue, okay?"  
  
Something in her tone bothered him - friendly and enigmatically affectionate, nearly coy; he was imagining it, anyway, though - and he brushed his thumb over the creased letterhead on the worn cover, not sure what to say in response. Miranda had by then reclaimed her position on the opposite wall along the entrance path, seated alongside an also-sitting Lizzie as the blonde leaned forward to engage the aloofly standing Gordo in one of their inexplicable verbal wars.  
  
"And I'm just the bitch of life," he sighed, pocketing the book and bending to retrieve his forgotten backpack.  
  
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End  
  
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Feedback: Yep. I likes it. Want more? Review! ^-  
  
Disclaimer: Everyone except for Mean Redheaded Girl and Girl Who Does Not Like School Food belong to their various creators as well as Disney, which my father affectionately refers to as the Evil Empire. Just because you need to know. 


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